Setting up a Server

This picture details the ramblings of an incompetent years ago, please do not follow it.

Need to selfhost mail? Need a fileserver? Well, here's some advice. We're gonna try to write this page like you've never done this shit before. It does, however, assume you have at least some basic GNU/Linux knowledge. If you don't, you probably aren't ready for this. You weren't going to set up a server using Windows, were you? Jesus Christ, how horrifying.

A lot of this applies to both a physical machine as well as a VPS setup.

Protecting Your Private Network

Use a DMZ, nigger.

Protecting from DDoS and shit

Use Fail2Ban and perhaps a redundant computer in the DMZ. Also never use passwords, only keyfiles.

Securing your shell

Add a non-root user. Then, while logged in as root, do this:

visudo

Go down to the bit where it says # User privilege specification, and copy the setup for the root line. So, if your non-root user is "faggot," make it look like so:

# User privilege specification
root     ALL=(ALL) ALL
faggot   ALL=(ALL) ALL

Install PuTTY, on a different machine than the one you are setting up as the server. This will include PuTTYGen. PuTTY is free software, and is available for Windows and most GNU/Linux distros.

Run PuTTYGen to generate a public/private key pair. Go with SSH-2 DSA, 4096 bits - nobody's gonna crack that shit easily. When done, it will display your public key. Except for the very beginning and very end, it will look like a shitton of gibberish - this is normal. Copy and paste that text into a text filr, but omit the last bit that says "dsa-key-########". DO NOT PUT IN A PASSPHRASE. Save the private key.

Open PuTTY and log in as your non-root user. Then do this:

mkdir /home/faggot/.ssh
nano /home/faggot/.ssh/authorized_keys

Paste in your public key that you saved as a text file. MAKE SURE IT IS ALL ONE LINE, like so:

 ssh-dsa [insanely long string of crap]

And save it.

Now take ownership of it:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

DO NOT LOG OUT OF PuTTY YET, but open another connection to your server, only this time point PuTTY to your private key file to test it out. If it all goes well, your login will look something like this:

Using username "faggot".
Authenticating with public key "dsa-key-########"

Assuming that works, close your previous PuTTY session and do this:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

You can change the SSH port here to a random number - that's optional though, because hacker bots are gonna find it anyhow. But if you do change it don't forget to change it in PuTTY as well.

But DO make the following changes:

PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no
X11Forwarding no
UsePAM no

Add the following to the bottom if missing:

UseDNS no
AllowUsers faggot

If you have additional users, put a space after "faggot" and add the next user, and so on if you have more.

Save these changes and restart your SSH server. On Debian or other system using a deprecated initscript setup it would be:

/etc/init.d/ssh reload

If you are using systemd, it would be:

(beats the fuck out of me, my server is Debian)

BOOM. Assuming all went well, you have now set up your shell so that 1) "root" cannot log in, 2) ONLY "faggot" can log in, and 3) "faggot" can ONLY log in using their private key file instead of a password. You'll still want to set up and install fail2ban or similar to secure things further.

Oh, and don't lose that private key file. You cannot recreate it, so losing it means you are doomed. Back it up in multiple places. You may wish to place a copy on a floppy drive (if you're a time-traveller from 1995) or USB stick as well, for safekeeping.

Setting Up Email

See also: Email

Want to use your own email server to avoid the NSA? Good call! But setting up email servers can be pretty complicated. Assuming you mostly don't know what the hell you are doing, and assuming you're already secured your system per above, have a peek at iRedMail. iRedMail is an automated email and web server setup package. It works best if installed on a FRESH system - if you're already fumbled around with Apache and/or dovecot and/or postfix and failed, wipe your shit and start over with iRedMail. It will install and configure Postfix, Dovecot, Apache, and MySQL. It also installs and configures fail2ban and iptables. It includes spam filtering and greylisting. It just works. Its pretty awesome.

You will, however, still need to manually set up your DNS records (MX, SPF, and DKIM).

If you want to get fancy and replace MySQL with MariaDB, or replace Apache with, say, Nginx, you can do that after you set up iRedMail, but any breakage is up to you to fix.